


the only thing

by hotmesslewis



Series: Lewis and Clark - Modern [3]
Category: Historical RPF, Lewis and Clark
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, M/M, Suicidal Thoughts, Suicide Attempt
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-11
Updated: 2017-10-11
Packaged: 2019-01-15 23:24:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,719
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12330915
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hotmesslewis/pseuds/hotmesslewis
Summary: Modern AU.  October 11.  Billy Clark is working late.  Meriwether Lewis is alone with his thoughts.





	the only thing

**Author's Note:**

> Because I never have been able to bring myself to write the actual scene; this is my offering. (Reading over it again, it's actually a really shitty depiction of the bipolar experience but I'm largely trying to maintain these as they were originally posted years ago on my Tumblr, so I didn't really do much to fix it. It's just an important thing to note, I think, given that I am a person living with bipolar, writing about a person who I also believe to have been bipolar. At least, in this modern au I have decidedly characterized Lewis as bipolar. Anyway, I'm rambling.)

He was going to be working late.

This was not a tragedy; Meriwether Lewis had to remind himself. It wasn’t the first time that Billy Clark had worked late; it sure as hell wouldn’t be the last. And there had been an apology and a certain sweetness in Billy’s phone call from the office.

_All the more for guilt._

“Hi, Meri, honey.”

“Billy, hey.” An attempt at enthusiasm; could his lover tell that it fell flat?

“You didn’t have any special plans for us tonight or anything, did you? Nothing in mind for dinner, anything like that.”

He knew it was coming even as he answered, keeping his voice even, casual, even as the phone started shaking in his hand ( _what a positively stupid reaction_ ), saying the words as if he actually meant them. “No, nothing in particular—why?”

“They’ve just got me working on this,” Billy’s voice sank; Meri could picture him, in his small office with the wood-paneled walls and the garish seascapes on either side of the messy bookshelf, turning away from the door in his chair, leaning into the phone more as he swore into it, “this God damn project so damn hard. Apparently some dumb-ass in the research department gave me the wrong—”

“No; it’s fine; don’t even worry about it.” The words spilled out of him, too quickly, relief tinting them like a blush of moonlight around the clouds of the chill early October evening. A pause from the other end of the call.

Billy had noticed.

He addressed it with hesitation.

“Are you sure you’re all right with this, Meriwether? Because, I mean, I can try to get away, if I need to come—”

“No, really, it’s fine. You need to do your job. I’m fine.” A sneer and a laugh from some shadowy corner in the room: _liar_.

“If you’re sure.” He could see Billy’s lips tightening over the words in concern; the uncertainty in Billy’s voice was warm and comfortable, like an old quilt, and Meri wished to wrap himself in it, but that would have been far too generous for him, with his thoughts . . .

“I’m sure.”

He expected Billy to hang up, but a pause wore out before Billy spoke again. “You do know, of course, that I would rather come home and be with you.”

_Did he really think that helped any?_ Yes, he did, and Meri knew it, and the guilt cascaded over him.

That was always the worst if it, really. The guilt.

“I know,” he replied softly, not convinced that he did.

“Okay, then. I love you.”

The silence was stretching again. Billy was waiting for him to speak.

The words were hard to say.

“I love you, too.”

“See you tonight.”

“Yes.”

An evening, all to himself. Billy Clark stuck at work until God knows when.

_It was a wonderful opportunity._

Slipping off his jacket, his tie, stepping out of his shoes with the damn laces that would never stayed tied, not like boots would—his goddamn job that he had to fucking _dress_ for, slacks and coats and ties in bland, conservative colors, a fucking _polo_ on casual Friday, if he was lucky, when he’d much rather be in a pair of well-cut jeans, a wool sweater, a tastefully striped button-down in warm oranges and reds ( _like the leaves; they’d turning back home in Virginia about this time_ ) or rich greens and blues ( _like the lake in the mountains; he and Billy used to go for weekends in the early autumn, out where he could_ breathe . . .). His goddamn fucking job, the ungrateful bastards who employed him as a landscape consultant but never let him _outside_ , and, oh, God, the terrible review he had gotten last week . . . _Despite the employee’s natural aptitude for and understanding of horticulture_ , the review, the fucking reviewers said, _the employee lacks people skills and has routinely failed . . ._

Failed.

_Failed_.

Meri considered failure as he made a dinner for himself, one of his vegetarian dishes that Billy found repulsive, a rich colorful medley, peppers and squash and zucchini over a bed of brown rice and a slice of wheat toast.

_Failed_ as he ate, half-reclining on the couch, staring at the blank TV screen, not realizing that he hadn’t turned it on.

He made a list of his failures, for the fun of it.

Failure as a son. Well, naturally—his resentment, his bitterness, his willingness to run away when his mother got remarried, taking to Dr. Thomas Jefferson and trying to be a son to him, until suddenly the man had a wife and son of his own.

Still, even not as a son, he’d been a failure to Tom, not having a sparkling record in academia, not having a prestigious career, worthy of his mentor’s reputation, living in New York with his partner (another failure to his mother, to Tom, despite what they said—loving a man and not having some blushing bride for them to coo over) and working in his inane job as a fucking consultant because he wasn’t good enough to do anything else, because despite his allegedly great “natural aptitude” he actually wasn’t worth shit when it came to botany, horticulture, more fit for killing plants than caring for them.

And then, of course, failure in his job—as if he hadn’t heard enough about that one lately, from those fucking hypocrites who praised his “good eye for color and better sense for what plants would work well together,” yet criticized his projects and threatened him with a suspension for yelling at a couple of particularly ignorant customers about how their idiotic ideas would result in the utter exhaustion of their already abused soil, how the plants they wanted were incompatible and would end up strangling each other.

But none of these compared to his biggest failure of them all: his failure of Billy.

He’d stopped eating, forgot to eat, pressing the tines of his fork into the back of his hands without realizing what he did, only relishing the pricks of pain.

God, that one hurt the worst, because everyone else realized the ways in which Meriwether Lewis had failed them, to a certain extent even had accepted him for his failures, but no, not Billy, looking at him and loving him as though he were some fantastic treasure, some wealth of a person, instead of the hollow, useless human shell that he actually was. Billy Clark, loving him so freely and willingly and _stupidly_ when he could easily do so much better than Meri Lewis, Failure Extraordinaire, spending a Monday night alone in a cold apartment not watching TV and torn between the intense desires to see the man he loved again and to never see him again; wanting to be loved by this incredible man but knowing he wasn’t worth it; trying to find a way to convince Billy that he really, truly deserved to find someone better, someone who could make him happier.

There must be someone better out there for Billy.

Meri stood, undid the second button of his shirt collar, undid the buttons of his shirt cuffs, and wandered into the kitchen, not aware of what he was doing. He left his plate on the couch. He remembered: a party, just a few months before, he and Billy in shabby tuxes in the basement club of some fancy restaurant, where the younger crowd from Billy’s office socialized over some professional success that Meri should undoubtedly remember.

His wary, wandering gray eyes had lighted on two women, staring at them, at his tall, athletic, redheaded lover with a look he didn’t like—curiosity, interest, lust.

Billy offered them barely a glance when Meri had drawn his attention to them.

“Who are they? Co-workers?”

“Uh, yeah. Marcie and Judy? Julie? From accounting or PR or something.”

Meri got a drink to stop himself from scowling at them, turning his glare instead on his partner, who kept looking at him with a strange curiosity and an intense smile.

“What?” Meri growled into his glass of whiskey, unable to look into Clark’s face too long.

“Just . . . nothing.”

“No. What?”

“It’s something stupid. Just never mind, you’d get annoyed with me for saying it.”

“Tell me, Billy.”

“It’s, like.” Even in the dark lights of the bar, Meri could see the redheaded man flushing. “It’s, like, sometimes I look at you and I realize just how incredible you really are all over again. Like finding it out for the first time.”

“Discovery,” Meri said quietly, with thought.

“Y-yeah. And part of me is like, I wonder if this is how people used to feel. Like, explorers and stuff. Is this how it felt to be able to mark something on a map, a river or whatever, for the first time? I kind of think that it must be. I—I don’t know.” Billy laughed, a bit bashfully, and Meri had grinned up at him at the time, but sent dark thoughts to the bottom of his glass: _I am no incredible discovery, no point worthy of marking on a map._

Because he wasn’t, nothing but a failure, a river that proved to lead nowhere. Spending a night alone, Billy working late, him standing in the kitchen alone, pawing through a drawer in the dark, looking for—

_There_.

A thin piece of metal, about an inch long, double-edged, shining even in the dark kitchen like the moonlight of two in the morning.

A razor blade.

An old relic, but he had kept it—partially in remembrance of the places he had been (the times he had been searching for a knife in this drawer, seen the blade, felt a gratefulness that made his legs weak), partially as insurance.

And what was it tonight, if not more than insurance.

He held it on his palm as he left the kitchen, walked through the den, back to the bathroom.

Meriwether Lewis, who hadn’t felt quite like this since he was seventeen years old, wanted to die.

_Nearly ten years._

For seven, nearly eight of them, he had mostly been so happy to live.

And now—would he be willing to keep living, even if he could convince Billy to leave him, that he truly did deserve someone better, someone who could be happy for him? (He may have wanted to, but he couldn’t leave Billy himself, not even for Billy’s own good—human nature, and Meri Lewis was far too selfish.)

_Would he be willing to keep living?_ No.

By no means.

(In the bathroom now, he switched on the light, but fluorescent bulbs were far too bright, hurt his eyes—he switched off the bathroom light, turned on the light in the hallway.)

He was a failure; he not only wanted to, he deserved to die.

_But would he keep living, if Billy left him?_

Probably, yes.

But Billy would never leave him, no matter how much he should.

So he would have to leave Billy, the only way he knew how.

Cool, dispassionate, he had thought about this before ( _planned it_ , but, no, he wasn’t that insane, that morbid)—he really should make this as neat as possible. Slip out of his clothes, into a bath of warm water, do the business. But he couldn’t bring himself to do that, quite, instead pulling down the toilet lid and sitting on it.

It was strange, how the razor shone in the light. So pretty, but for the moment he set it on the edge of the sink.

The impulse, first, to roll up his sleeve, but then—no. Cuffs loose, his fingers turning the edge of them when he stopped, and his hand went to his collar instead, slowly unbuttoning his shirt down, pulling it off his shoulders. Usually so particular, he let it drop to a pile on the dusty floor, then eased his undershirt from his waistband, pulled it over his head, dropped it to the floor as well.

Bare-chested, then, sitting on the lid of the toilet, he picked up his pretty toy again and his eyes were drawn to the three small, neat scars on his left arm.

A finger, playing in the lines and curves of the middle of the piece of steel.

The memory of high school—he’d spent so much time ashamed of the fading scars, trying to explain them away, accidents: to Billy, some early morning-after when his younger boyfriend pinned his arm to the bed and traced the lightening lines of them with a finger ( _did Billy believe him?_ ); to Tom, when they were fresh and raw and red, dark scars bumping on his wrist ( _Tom didn’t believe him, did he?_ ); to his mother, catching him one time, holding the knife, wiping the thin line of blood, and so wanting to believe what he said and not what she saw ( _she didn’t believe him_ ).

_But at the time, it felt so—_

No.

It didn’t feel good.

It hurt like hell.

_But it helped._

Three scars. He remembered them all, and more than anything, he remembered the desire for death.

The first time—a quiet moment, too late at night in his bedroom; a timid cut, a thin, shallow line, a slight curve at the end when his hand shook. It was ideation: _could he?_

The second time—moving to the bathroom for the sake of neatness; bolder, deeper, not so far up the forearm, he liked to watch the blood more than he liked the cold sting of the knife. Intention: _should he?_

And then, the final time—right above the wrist, staring at the river of veins under the thin skin, thick and blue and marveling at how that blue would turn to red when it touched the air, pushing the blade harder than he expected with the intensity of his desire to smell the blood, a messy line, the thoughts of getting caught again shouldn’t have been so thrilling. Attempt: _would he?_

So many years later ( _nearly ten—God, he was getting old_ ) and he still didn’t understand why he had stopped himself from bleeding out.

_But what about tonight, Meriwether Lewis? You, alone in this apartment, waiting for him to come home, do you have the courage to do it? Will you let yourself die? Will you even have the guts to take the razor to your wrist, to save him, to save yourself?_

He didn’t know.

He held the razor.

He stared at his arm.

Time passed.

-

Billy, stumbling in the front door, closer to one in the morning than midnight; how the hell did it get so late?

“Meri?” he called out softly. So late; he hoped that his lover was already asleep.

God, he should have been home by eight, nine at the latest, but, then, redoing a week’s worth of work in one night . . .

No response from Meriwether. Hopefully he was already in bed.

Billy dumped his computer bag on the couch and saw the plate, the half-eaten food.

“Meri?”

Looking around him more careful, he noticed the light in the hall was still on; strange. Meri would have never left the light on, not the hall light, even if he were waiting for Billy to come home. A chill came over him.

“Meri, honey? Are you asleep?”

He wasn’t in the bedroom. Billy pushed tentatively on the cracked bathroom door.

And leaned into the doorframe when he saw the sight before him. “Oh, God, Meri.”

The man that he loved, sitting bare-chested in the dark bathroom, holding a razor blade.

Frantic, first: _had he_ —

No.

Meri looked up, but didn’t seem to recognize him for a moment.

“Billy.” Realization, then: the blade. “I, um.”

“I know.” _I have known._

Meri’s eyes were back on the razor blade as Billy slipped it from his fingers. “It’s funny, the way it shines. Like the moon off the ocean.”

And he broke, tears spilling over, collapsing in on himself. Setting the razor on the back of the sink, Billy sat down in the floor and pulled Meri down with him, wrapping his arms around him, pulling him close.

Holding him, Billy spoke softly into the light brown hair. “You scared the shit out of me, Meri.”

Crying a bit himself.

They fell asleep, clinging to each other on the bathroom floor.


End file.
